Artist: Husni Osman
Medium: Acrylic and Collage on 200gm Paper
Size: 60cm x 48cm x 4cm (d) each with Frame
Year: 2014
A major wall piece that spans over a massive 22 feet long has occupied the daily life of Husni Osman throughout the year 2014. Why are You Where Those Blue Glasses? is a selection of 36 pieces that portrays the gradual changes over the different periods of the artist’s time during that particular year. The different or familiar faces depict the very average middle class people whom we sometimes brush off or try to remember in our daily encounters.
In this series of works, the personal portrait of the artist is often inserted. With the passing of time, his portraits change as constantly as his techniques: from collage on paper to a more textured realist style, to abstract strokes with mere suggestion of forms.
Rendering the portraits is not about trying to capture the realistic features of people he saw or met. Rather, it is about capturing the soul from his viewpoint and understanding. The logical part of the mind becomes non-functional, and instead it is all about the projection of the artist; from the expression of his mind to the emotions of his heart and finally to the flow of his hands that splashes the colour on the paper.
Like Giacometti’s line drawings, Husni’s methods are suggestive of the act of drawing and painting while imagining the object or subject. The artist is searching for a depth and intrinsically creating value and movement in the drawings at the same time.
A question arises: whose portraits are we really looking at and why do they always wear those blue glasses? To Husni, the faces, be it named or nameless, have his or her own perspective and way of looking at life through those warm blue glasses.
On the other hand, the faces of Why Are You Wearing Those Blue Glasses? can also be read collectively as a portrait of the Malaysian society, of people from disparate walks of life that face common challenges, be it class, race, internal or interpersonal struggles…and even, a portrait of us.